Melvina Walker

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MelvinaJulia Walker (born 1874) was a British working class activist and suffragette. She was a member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), the East London Federation of Suffragettes and the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International).

Biography

Walker was born in 1874 in Jersey, Channel Islands. [1] She left school in her mid teenage years, [2] and worked as a ladies maid and dressmaker. [3] She married a dock worker and they lived on East India Dock Road in Poplar, London. [3] [4]

Walker was involved on the picket lines during the 1912 London dock strike [5] and became a popular speaker, working class activist and suffragette in the East End of London. [2] She was a member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and the Worker's Socialist Federation. [6] She was arrested for her suffrage activism in 1914 and was imprisoned in Holloway Prison. [4] [7]

Walker later joined Sylvia Pankhurst's East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS). [2] [8] [9] With the ELFS, during World War I Walker protested against food shortages, rising food prices and class inequalities in food distribution. [9] She wrote about the actions for the Women's Dreadnought newspaper, recounting raids on sugar in West End cafes [9] and how working-class women who had queued unsuccessfully for potatoes ended up forcing a fried fish shop owner to part with his supplies. [10]

In November 1918, Walker attended the first Labour Party Women's Conference as a delegate of the WSF, [11] despite feeling that the Labour movement had been "captured" by middle-class women and that not enough working women had a platform to speak. [12]

In May 1919, Walker was elected to the Poplar Trades Council and Central Labour Party, alongside Norah Smyth and L. Watts. However, when the three appeared at a Labour Party meeting arguing in support of Bolshevism, they were expelled. [13] After their expulsion, Walker, Smyth and Pankhurst formed the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International). [14]

In 1932, Pankhurst described Walker, writing in The Home Front: A Mirror to Life in England During the World War that: "she seemed to me like a woman of the French Revolution. I could imagine her on the barricades, waving the bonnet rouge, urging on the fighters with impassioned cries. When in full flood of her oratory, she appeared the very embodiment of toiling, famine-ridden, proletarian womanhood." [2] [4]

References

  1. ↑ "Mrs Melvina Julia Walker". Women's Suffrage Resources. Retrieved 28 November 2025.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Agnew, Megan (29 May 2018). "The lost stories of the Bow Suffragettes". Tower Hamlets Slice. Retrieved 28 November 2025.
  3. 1 2 Smith, Angela K. (2005). Suffrage Discourse in Britain During the First World War. Ashgate. p. 47. ISBN   978-0-7546-3951-0.
  4. 1 2 3 Jackson, Sarah; Taylor, Rosemary (4 August 2014). Voices from History: East London Suffragettes. The History Press. ISBN   978-0-7509-6216-2.
  5. ↑ Darlington, Ralph (2020). "The pre-First World War British women's suffrage revolt and labour unrest: never the twain shall meet?". Labor History. 61 (5–6). Taylor & Francis. Retrieved 28 November 2025.
  6. ↑ McIlroy, John; Morgan, Kevin; Campbell, Alan (2001). Party People, Communist Lives: Explorations in Biography. Lawrence & Wishart. p. 247. ISBN   978-0-85315-936-0.
  7. ↑ "HO 45/24665. SUFFRAGETTES: Amnesty of August 1914: index of people arrested, 1906-1914". National Archives London. Retrieved 25 November 2025.
  8. ↑ Davis, M. (2017). East End Women, Sylvia Pankhurst and the Russian Revolution 1917 to 1922. Theory & Struggle, (118), 98-107. Retrieved 28 November 2025.[ dead link ]
  9. 1 2 3 Swan, Elaine; Psarikidou, Katerina (2024). ""Working women demand peace and food": Gender and class in the East London Federation of Suffragettes' food politics". Gender, Work & Organization. 31 (3): 1113–1132. doi:10.1111/gwao.13000. ISSN   1468-0432.
  10. ↑ Bush, Julia (1984). Behind the Lines: East London Labour, 1914-1919. Merlin Press. p. 81. ISBN   978-0-85036-304-3.
  11. ↑ Winslow, Barbara (27 July 2021). Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism. Verso Books. p. 160. ISBN   978-1-83976-164-5.
  12. ↑ Rowbotham, Sheila (1977). Hidden From History: 300 Years of Women's Oppression and the Fight Against It. Pluto Press. p. 159. ISBN   978-0-904383-56-0.
  13. ↑ Shipway, Mark (27 July 2016). Anti-Parliamentary Communism: The Movement for Workers’ Councils in Britain, 1917–45. Springer. p. 63. ISBN   978-1-349-19222-9.
  14. ↑ "Today in London radical herstory, 1914: International Womens Day march sees launch of newspaper the Woman's Dreadnought". LONDON RADICAL HISTORIES. 8 March 2020. Retrieved 28 November 2025.
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